Posts Tagged ‘overwhelm’
Overwhelmed and Stressed
Monday, November 14th, 2011A Case For Never Picking Up Strangers
If we only get one body, then why do I sometimes feel like I’m walking around with two heads?
Of course I’m now at an age where I get to blame it on hormones.
But perhaps that’s just a convenient excuse for explaining why I keep forgetting where I left my keys only to realize minutes later where they are. Which just happens to be after I’ve already locked myself out of the house.
But if I’m really being honest, it’s because the busier I become, the behind-er I get. My mind is one step ahead of where I’m trying to go and I’m . . .
Overwhelmed and Stressed
Overwhelmed and her evil twin sister, Stressed, seductively lure you in.
One minute you’re going down life’s highway minding your own business. The next?
There they are – with their thumbs out asking for a free ride. There’s a reason Mom warns you to never pick up strangers.
Because just like some strange hitchhikers you’ve picked up and forgotten to drop off along the way, pretty soon you’re driving them around and they haven’t even paid a nickle for the gas.
Not only that, but the longer they hang around, the more entitled they feel to shout directions – in stereo – from the back seat, “Do this, do that, go here, go there – now, now, now!”
Suddenly “too much” meets “not enough.”
And, surprise: the “not enough” has nothing to do with time. You always have all the time there is. There’s nothing you can do to change “clock” time.
What I’m talking about is too much information and not enough “sorting criteria.” And this inevitably forces you onto the road where Sisters Overwhelm and Stressed are waiting to be picked up.
This is how it happens.
Let’s say you start out with a few things you need to get done. Each of them is important in its own way. So you put up a mental remember to do list.
Which is fine, if you only had a few things up there. But as life gets increasingly busier and busier?
Pretty soon your mental checklist is greater than your capacity to easily recall . . . which, in case you were curious, is around 5 to 9 “bits” of information at any one time.
So let’s say you’ve got about 20 To Dos on your list and 5 of them are about to go nuclear.
At this point, it’s no longer a remember to do list, it’s now become a remember to worry about this list. Your mind now tries to keep you on track by unconsciously bringing all those To Do’s to your attention (even if only for a millisecond in between other tasks).
The Proper Way to Eat an Elephant?
What started out as a simple remember to do list now occupies your mental airspace with ever increasing demands on you to not forget to do. Sisters Overwhelmed and Stressed have just jumped on board.
Because you’re focused on not forgetting, your mind becomes busy at trying to remember everything. Now by the time you think of the last remember to do, you’re already mentally circling back to the first. You’re suddenly in a roundabout.
You’re caught in an infinite loop, a Wheel of Worry, where the end of one thought is simply the beginning of another.
What’s even weirder? Once things start going round and round, you haven’t any way to prioritize your to dos, or to distinguish the big from the small. Everything is equally important and equally challenging. Cleaning crumbs out of the cutlery drawer is lumped together with finishing a client presentation.
You might try to ignore Sisters Overwhelm and Stress who are suddenly along for the ride on this Wheel of Worry, but they’re pretty much a case of the “elephant in the room.”
They’re loud, they smell, they take up too much room, and they’re hell to feed (not to mention the constant clean up).
Well Done and Always One Bite At a Time
But there’s a way to get out of this roundabout and drop the Sisters off at the nearest intersection.
First, you need to do a mental purge.
Here’s an easy way how.
Breaking all your “to dos” into smaller, individual, bite size tasks gives you a way to create sorting criteria. You’ll be able to evaluate and prioritize your way out of your mental roundabout in no time at all.
Simply grab a bunch of different colored index cards. Choose a color for each category (i.e., green for household, blue for business, etc.)
Now write each to do onto its own separate index card by category. Keep writing until you exhaust your supply of mental to dos. Don’t stop until you’ve mentally purged each and every one onto a card.
No matter how many to dos you have, eventually you’ll reach the end of your list. It’s no longer infinite.
Now take your cards and sort them according to category. Once you have your categories, each card within your category can be evaluated.
Can a bigger task be broken down into smaller steps?
If so, create individual cards that represent those smaller steps and clip them in a sequence to the back of your larger to do.
Once you’ve done this, organize your cards by:
Category and/or subject and
Priority (using a numbering system 1 through 10, ten being most important).
Make sure you’ve noted on each one:
The steps needed to accomplish each task, and
How much time you need to accomplish it.
From these, calendar the necessary time based on priority.
When I do this I find that I do indeed have enough time. I can get everything done . . . just not all at once.
I’ve soon left the Evil Sisters Overwhelm and Stress at the curb and I’m headed down the road again.
Cleaning crumbs out of the cutlery drawer doesn’t seem nearly as important or herculean an effort as it used to be. And my presentation is calendared into smaller, more manageable steps that I can easily finish in time.
Simply by breaking things down to their smallest elements, I suddenly find I have all the time I need to get everything I need to get done.
And since I’ve written it all down, I can relax. I can let my cards hold onto the information while my mind is free to focus on the task at hand.
Mom was right, never pick up strangers!